By Chinese standards, Gu Kailai was an unusually high-profile politician's wife: not only charming, elegant and intelligent, but boasting a high-flying legal career.

Yet, like the famous and infamous women to whom she has been compared – from Jackie Kennedy to Lady Macbeth – her life has been shaped as much by her husband and high politics as by her will and talent.

Bo Xilai, the ousted Chongqing party secretary, was a charismatic but divisive leader who shared her ambition and taste for publicity and her revolutionary heritage.

Gu's mother, Fan Chengxiu, is descended from a famous Song dynasty minister, but joined the party at 14 and later led a band of Communist guerrillas. Gu's father, Gu Jingsheng, was a general who took charge of missile research but was ousted in the 1950s anti-rightist movement because Fan was judged politically unreliable. Though urged to divorce by comrades, he stood by her.

"It affected his political career for several decades. He never regretted it or complained," Fan later wrote. "He was a man out of the ordinary."

In 1966, when Gu was just seven, the lives of the five daughters took another turn for the worse as the Cultural Revolution broke out. Their father was jailed for 12 years; not long afterwards their mother, too, was detained.

Gu Jingsheng had already foreseen what was likely to happen, warning his children that their parents might have to go away.

"Don't think too much just because I and your mother suffer criticism every day and they come to home to search frequently," he urged them in a letter. "Don't be threatened by the door-knocking and confiscations during the night, and don't be misled by the neighbourhood children [if they accuse us]."

While her elder sisters did their best to protect Gu, the family struggled to survive. She worked as a labourer, in a textile factory and as a butcher's assistant. Even then, she did everything well, it seemed; years later, she could still cut meat cleanly with a single cleaver stroke.

The end of the turmoil and her parents' rehabilitation cleared the way for Gu to go to the prestigious Peking University, where she studied law and international relations. She met Bo on a university research trip, she told a magazine. He was party secretary of the area she visited and "very much like my father, that sort of extremely idealistic person".

The background to their meeting was more complicated than that wide-eyed account suggested. Their fathers had long known each other, first meeting in the 1930s; her sister's husband was the brother of Bo's first wife.

That marriage ended acrimoniously in the early 80s and Gu married Bo in 1986. He treated his young bride "like a queen", said a friend, and their son Guagua was born the following year.

Soon after, Gu set up her own law firm, Kailai, and took the professional name Horus L Kai. Though it evoked the falcon deity, it was taken, more prosaically, from the title of Egyptair's inflight magazine, glimpsed on a business trip.

Gu proved equally canny, writing a book about her battle to overturn a US court judgment against Dalian-based firms. It lauded the support she had received from "the big man in the family".

She said she took on the case at the request of Dalian officials and there were other signs of crossover with her husband's work. In 1996, she represented the Port of Singapore in a $1.5bn joint venture deal with the Port of Dalian.

As Bo climbed the political ladder, friends wondered if his wife's business activities could become a hindrance. Her law firm, now based in Beijing, changed its name to Angdao. Even so, Gu remained registered with the firm and acquaintances believe her involvement continued for some time. Angdao has refused to comment.

In his final public appearance this year, Bo said he was "touched" by his wife's sacrifice in becoming a housewife for his sake.

Others thought Gu learned to revel in her status as Bo's wife. "She enjoyed people asking for favours and being treated like a star," says one of those who knew her.

But the couple were leading increasingly separate lives. One friend said Gu was distraught when Bo became conspicuously enchanted by another woman in the early 1990s, confiding that she had contemplated divorce and suicide. As time went on, she spent increasingly lengthy periods with her parents in Beijing or overseas.

Ever since the announcement of her detention on suspicion of murdering Neil Heywood, officials have referred to her as "Bogu Kailai", in what some have seen as a hint she had obtained foreign residency or even a foreign passport. While mainland women rarely combine their names with their husbands, it is common in Singapore. An official said Gu had obtained Singaporean nationality or residency. Chinese law does not allow dual nationality.

For much of the time she appears to have been in the UK, where Guagua was studying. At one stage she lived in Bournemouth, where she and Patrick Devillers, a French architect who was also part of her inner circle, gave the same address when they registered as directors of a company.

Many of the people who encountered her there recall her as kind, polite and friendly. Giles Hall, a businessman who dealt with her, was struck by her charm when she approached him with an unusual request to export a hot air balloon to Dalian.

But Hall saw another side to her when he angered her by refusing to bulk up the invoice so she could bring another £200,000 into the country to pay her son's school fees. When the firm did not meet what he called an overly ambitious deadline for delivery, she warned him that if he came to China "we can get you thrown in jail. You'll never see the light of day," he told Associated Press.

Heywood told friends Gu worried about betrayal, believed people were out to get her and was "mentally unstable".

One account of her trial said the court heard she had bipolar disorder and moderate schizophrenia, while Xinhua said she had been treated for "insomnia, anxiety and depression, and paranoia" in the past.

Certainly, she told friends she was considering treatment for depression. She seems to have led an increasingly solitary life and Bo Guagua described her as living "like a hermit" in an interview in 2009.

He suggested she turned down social invitations because she did not want to be in his father's shadow.

Three years on, Gu has overshadowed Bo and determined his political fate; not through her achievements, but her crime.